Reader Question: Should I reference other movies when pitching my own?

“I have heard/read that most Hollywood types believe it to be amateurish, while others feel it gives the reader a better sense of the story.”

A question from mscherer:

What is your take on using the infamous: ‘in the vein of…’ (or something akin) when submitting queries? For example, I use the following for one of my specs:

Scorpio Cruise is Falling Down meets Taken.

I have heard/read that most Hollywood types believe it to be amateurish, while others feel it gives the reader a better sense of the story.

As with everything in Hollywood, there are no hard-and-fast rules, and if there were, then it’s a mortal lock someone would come along and break them.

For example, let’s say I declare, “You must never do a mash-up of two movie titles when querying an agent or manager,” I guarantee tomorrow in the trades, there would be an article about a huge spec script sale in which some manager would be quoted as saying, “I was going to hit delete on the email query, but when I read, ‘It’s Bambi meets Caligula,’ I knew it was going to be a hit.”

Likewise if I assert, “By all means, you must give reps a mash-up of movie titles for your project to present them with a clear idea of what your story is about,” there would be an article in the trades tomorrow titled, “Pet Rep Peeves” in which sitting there at Numero Uno would be: “Writers who include a title mash-up when querying us.”

So all I’m going to do here — as I pretty much always do with this series — is provide my humble opinion.

99% of the time, I would recommend you do not include a title mash-up in your query. Why? Because to me in a truncated scenario such as that, where you have perhaps 2–3 lines in an email to connect with a rep, a mash-up suggests you do not have confidence in your logline.

In other words, your logline must be strong enough to convey the story to a query reader in and of itself. If your logline isn’t strong enough [and by the way, this basically means your story concept], then tacking on “It’s Bridesmaids meets Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is not going to sell it.

The 1% of the time where you may have some latitude is based on two things: (1) Your logline is super strong; (2) The mash-up is a perfect distillation of the story concept.

That is you are coming from a position of strength, not using the mash-up to make up for the weakness of your logline.

Now if you find yourself in an elevator pitch scenario or even a formal pitch setting, there’s no reason you can’t have that title mash-up in your hip pocket, so that at the end of your spiel, when you need that little extra to take your presentation to 11 — “one louder” — you’ve got it right there: “It’s Finding Nemo meets The Silence of the Lambs.”

How about you, readers? Yea or nay to title mash-ups in queries?

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